If you skip strength training because you don’t want big bulging muscles, the good news is that you don’t have to develop them if you workout right. In fact, for women, it’s nearly impossible, even if your goal is getting a set of guns that everyone would envy and for men, the right training can tone and build some muscle without getting the look of body builders that takes far more effort and the right type of training.
Strength training can help you avoid injury.
Whether it’s in the gym or at home, pulled muscles and falls can occur. While strength training won’t alert you to that child’s toy on the stairs that you trip over, it can prevent injury from doing every day tasks, like lifting a child or picking up a box. The boost in your strength that the training provides helps make muscles more resilient and resistant to injury. It also helps decrease the risk of falls.
Strength training will help you take off weight and keep it off permanently.
While aerobic exercise does burn a lot of calories, strength training is actually better for long term weight loss. When you burn calories during aerobic exercise, the body isn’t picky where it gets those calories. It burns both lean muscle mass and fat tissue. The more lean muscle mass you have, the more calories you burn twenty-four/seven, so having less means a lower metabolism. Strength training builds muscle tissue as it burns calories, boosting your metabolism and making weight loss even easier.
Prevent muscle wasting and osteoporosis with strength training.
After your mid 30s, most people start losing muscle mass. Sarcopenia, the loss of muscle mass that can be as much as three to five percent per year if you’re inactive. When you lose muscle mass, bone loss tends to follow, which is why osteoporosis and sarcopenia often go hand in hand. Many larger studies show that high-intensity resistance training, not only helps prevent or even reverse osteoporosis, it also improves balance, strength and muscle mass that can help prevent broken bones and falls. Studies also show it does it even better than most pharmacological or nutritional approaches.
- You’ll look thinner than your weight indicates and have a body without ugly bulges and rolls when you include strength training in your workout.
- Strength training, like all types of workouts, boosts your endorphins while burning off the hormones of stress.
- Strength training can improve the way your muscles work together. That can improve your balance, coordination and even posture. It reduces the risk of falling by as much as 40 percent, according to one study.
- One amazing discovery about strength training is that it actually can help control pain and help with chronic conditions. One study showed that people with arthritis who did strength training got as much relief as they did with pain medication. It also helps control glucose levels.